John S.

I am a practicing attorney and my "profile" was posted some time ago to the Avvo site without my consent, along with an arbitrary 6.5/10 "rating," with zero reviews, which apparently came from nowhere. I called and was told the rating comes from an "algorithm like Google," but that makes no sense as I do not participate in the respected attorney rating services like Martindale-Hubbell and therefore have never been "rated" by anyone. They agreed to remove my profile after a few weasel-worded emails trying to defend this nonsense.

The deal, apparently, is that you can join this "service" and gratuitously endorse other lawyers to gain ratings. It also sounds like you can pay money to raise your rating or what have you.
It's flatly libelous in my opinion, given that attorneys are added to the site without contacting them first (presumably from some web crawler scraping the state bar websites) and unless you agree to participate, you are saddled with a baseless low rating.

It's hard enough to build a professional reputation without these yahoos extorting people to participate in their meaningless database.

Don't encourage them.